Sunday, May 22, 2016

Staunton, May 22 – People are always
profoundly affected by their physical environment, and now a Moscow architect
is arguing that the creation of high-rise “sleeping districts” in Russian
cities, regions that have become a kind of “ghetto” for those who live in them,
are playing a major role in keeping the values of the Soviet past very much
alive.

In comments to Lenta.ru, Vitaly
Stadnikov, an urbanist at Moscow’s Higher School of Economics, says that
Russians have been affected not only as a result of moving from villages to
cities but from barracks and communal apartments to apartments in high rise
housing in districts on the periphery of these cities (lenta.ru/articles/2016/05/20/sleep_district/).

If urbanization in general had
positive consequences for many Russians, he says, the concentration of people
in the high rises of sleeping districts has not.That is because this form of housing
reproduces and reinforces some of the worst aspects of Soviet society, reducing
the lives of residents to something “boring, dull and uniform.”

Residents of these districts like
people in Soviet times want to get away from where they live and go to work as
quickly as possible and when they return sit “in front of a television or
computer. “If the authorities think it useful to give rise to an alienated and
angry population, then high rise micro-districts are one way to do that,” the
architect says.

Given that most Russians now live in
such places – at present, he says, about 80 percent of Russians live in cities
and about three-quarters of urban residents live in such micro districts – that
constitutes the dominant psychological environment for more than half of the
population of the country.

This pattern, Stadnikov says, sets
Russia apart “from a majority of the other countries of the world.”

One of the reasons such housing has
this influence, he continues, is that Russians retain “an outdated idea about
their residences,” viewing their apartments as their real living space that
they should take care of and everything “beyond the doors as somewhere one can
spit and throw trash.”

“But today,” Stadnikov argues, “a
residence out to be a full-fledged element of the urban milieu on which now to
a significant degree depends the quality of life of people.” Micro-districts on
the edge of cities not only do not offer much in the way of urban amenities but
isolate residents from what a city should and can offer.

Since the death of Stalin, most
urban residents in Russia have moved from barracks and communal apartments,
although these still exist, first to five ornine-story panel housing, the so-called “Khrushchevs,” most of which are
still near the middle of cities, to 17 to 24-story high rises on the edge of urban
areas.

Nikita Khrushchev solved his
immediate task of getting Russians into separate apartments but only by “de
facto prohibiting architecture” and its concerns about space and its impact on
people. And his successors, who were able to build taller buildings as the cost
of lifts declined, did as well and with much the same side effect.

But while Khrushchev kept most of
his new buildings in the older parts of the city, his successors built them on
the edge of town where land was more available. And that has had a serious set
of consequences: such tall buildings are put real pressure on people
psychologically and even medically, and their location “inflicts colossal harm
on the city.”

As a collection of housing alone,
such districts “form a boring and depressive environment which gives birth to
[their] own marginal figures and attracts aliens,” including criminals, without
giving back to the city. Indeed, such places only require ever more resources
from the urban government.

Overcoming their influence by taking
the radical steps American states have done in the case of high rise public
housing will be difficult if not impossible: most of the apartments are
privately owned if not occupied by their owners, and the amount of alternative
housing available is too small.

As a result, Stadnikov says, “the
aggressive faceless environment of these panel buildings, in which Russians
today live, exerts a definite influence on their behavior and attitudes. It
forms in them a sense of total alienation from others and individualism in the
very worst sense.”

Such an environment, he continues, “does
not promote community – residents of high rises often do not know even their
own neighbors on a common stairwell.” Moreover, the areas between such
buildings “do not fulfill their chief function as a space of socialization but
serve only as a midway point between the apartment and the street.”

That is a major reason why Russian
society remains so “fragmented” and why “it is difficult to build horizontal
ties,” the Moscow urbanist says.

Today, Stadnikov argues, “the sleeping
regions are still not like ghettos because [Russian] society remains mixed, but
already in recent years, in Moscow, one can see processes of the territorial
delimitation between the rich and poor;” and the micro districts play their
role in that as well.